Two hour show – no break. Bang, done.
The best bit – was a kind of stand up sketch – an impassioned lecture – infused with gentle humour – looking at the complex relationship between brain structure – brain functioning – memory – the importance of imagination and stories – and our capacity to envision a future.
Then two stories – about trying to recover memories and the role of imagination in that – one of the discovery of a body of a man in the Alps, who died five thousand years ago – the other of a woman who travels across Eastern Europe to find her father, after finding out that he wasn’t, as she’d been told all her life, dead.
The special effects, the fragments of this and that, the very clever use of music, set design, lighting and sound, and the physical action and timing of the cast were riveting.
The golden thread through the whole show was a gentle comedy – in fact I’d go so far to say that this was a very subtle comedy.
The story about the ice man and how the scientists traced together a possible explanation of who he was and how he came to be there was fascinating and sobering at the same time – and made me want to find out more.
At the end though, there was no sting in the tail – I don’t think it left me with any new profound insights into memory etcetera. Perhaps just a reminder that we all curate our memories, and perhaps the tantalising thought that if our memories sadden or taunt us in some ways, or if there is a gaping great big hole, then you can just make it up.
Hmmm? Really. Take a child in care, who has been moved from one place to the other since birth – they can often find by the time they are a teenager they have no memory whatsoever of their childhood – and no-one they know who can tell them about it – because no-one they know as a young adult or adolescent knew them when they were younger. Can you really advise them to just make it up? No, I’m pretty sure that if they want to know they want to get as close to the truth as possible. Of course whatever facts they get will no doubt be worked on by their imagination.
Mnemonic, National Theatre, London, August 2024